B&T was lucky enough to be invited along to a Facebook media briefing last week with its vice president of News Feed, Adam Mosseri (pictured above), where he shared the social media giant’s blueprint in support of journalism and news publishers, and reflected on his conversation with News Corp around a potential subscription deal.

According to Mosseri, Facebook has three key themes for News Feed this year – discovery, integrity and partnership – that it hopes will strengthen journalism across the globe.

Discovery

This theme is basically about helping Facebook users learn about new things they might not even know exist yet.

On top of its ‘Pages You Might Like’ feature, Mosseri revealed that Facebook is looking to introduce topic following.

“The idea here is that you could follow your favourite sports team as a topic, for example, and then we would go and try to find all of the most interesting stuff for you about the team, and that would show up in your News Feed,” he said.

“We think this could be valuable for you because you love your team and you want to see what’s going on, but also for publishers, because it could mean that more publishers get connected to audiences.”

Mosseri said Facebook will use a classification algorithm to achieve this, but will only launch the topic following feature if it’s incremental.

“This is of value, but if it only ends up just displacing something else in News Feed, then it’s not worth the complexity – we’re just making the system more complicated without creating incremental value for people,” he said.

Another idea that Facebook has subtly introduced to News Feed is Discovery Surface, which has an icon resembling a rocket ship.

“The idea is that is News Feed is a place where you catch up on all of these stories from your existing connections, then explore could be a space where you could learn about stuff from publishers that you’re not even connected to yet,” Mosseri said.

Integrity

Facebook is also looking to raise the quality and authenticity of information that flows through its system through ways such as improved reporting – understanding what is problematic or ‘false’ news, for instance.

Mosseri said Facebook prefers to refer to ‘fake’ news as ‘false’ news “because we want to be really clear about what we mean, and fake news has been used by so many different people to mean so many different things”.

“For us, we man information that is designed to be confused with legitimate news but is intentionally false,” he said.

One of the most meaningful things Facebook has done to combat false news is in the area of landing page quality work, while protecting ad farms and valuing them way less in ranking, according to Mosseri.

“The most important thing we can do around false news, given that most of it’s financially motivated – at least on our platform – is to disrupt the economics,” he said.

“We organise our work in false news into three areas: the first is disrupting the incentive in the first place, trying to reduce it from ending up on our platform.

“The second is, given that some of it’s going to end up on the platform, better identifying it and reducing its spread through the ecosystem.

“The third area is around creating more discerning readers through education. We’re looking to create signals to help people make more informed decisions about what to read, what to trust, what to share.”

Facebook’s VP of News Feed also shared how the social media giant defines clickbait – “as headlines that withhold significant amounts of information and mislead the user”.

“We focus on really the egregious stuff, but the way it works is that it actually ends up being its own prediction,” he explained.

“So, we built an algorithm, [and] we built a training data set which has tens of thousands of examples in 13 different languages. We then train the algorithm based on that data set to try and figure out what are good signs of clickbait – certain phrasing, certain grammatical structures.

“Then what happens for any given headline is we don’t say, ‘This is clickbait, this is not’. We calculate the likelihood that it’s clickbait based on the data set that we have available, and the higher likelihood that it’s clickbait, the bigger the penalty. It’s not black and white.”

Partnership

Facebook is also keen to become a better partner to the media industry, and in particular, the news sector.

It’s big areas of focus in this sector are to help news organisations “cut through the noise” by telling more compelling stories with new formats, and identifying opportunities to collaborate with regional publishers on local news/

“But if I’m honest, we don’t have the answers yet on local news,” Mosseri admitted.

“Local news is suffering more than national news, and we know that local news is the foundation in a lot of ways for local communities, so we’re trying to figure out how we can get involved and monetisation products – we’re exploring mid-roll ads on video, and we’re exploring subscriptions with a number of partners currently.

“I’m bullish about the ideas we currently have, but I also want to acknowledge that I think we’re behind and we need to move more quickly.

Mosseri’s Australian visit was primarily to meet with local news publishers about potential subscription deals, and said he had a “good conversation” with News Corp.

“There’s a lot of concern about a lot of things right now,” Mosseri said.

“We just trying to engage in this as best we can, but most of the conversations I’ve been in have been productive and comfortable.”

In the latest episode of the Marketing Dividends series presented by the AANA, the marketers behind two of Queensland’s biggest brands offer insights into how physical retail presence can be used to drive customer experience and to build brands. Joining host James Hier were Mark Reinke, chief customer experience officer at Suncorp; and Darren Wright, […]

Australia Post has unveiled a new campaign via Y&R Melbourne that focuses on the build-up preparations for Christmas and the role the postal service plays in making delivery and collection services easier. The integrated campaign spans TV, outdoor, digital and social channels, with Shipster – Australia Post’s free shipping membership service that launched last month […]

Former Saatchi & Saatchi Melbourne group creative director Leon Wilson is joining forces with branding and design agency Red Robyn’s founder Robyn Brazenall to evolve the agency’s offering. Red Robyn have been creating and supporting some of Australia’s most recognised brands for over 15 years. The new agency, Robyn&Leon, is restructuring around three verticals… branding […]

Men’s Health Australia has announced one of the world’s top fitness coaches, Chief Brabon, will join the team in the capacity of fitness director. Brabon, alongside his business partner and wife, Emilie Brabon-Hames founded the ultimate transformation program TransformationCoach.com which has radically changed the lives of Australian celebrities, including: Larry Emdur, and most recently, music sensation and Men’s […]

Want to know what every business will be talking about in 2018, but want to know it first? Well, business education site Onlinembatoday.com and news site Forbes has done just that and, thankfully for you, it all comes in easily digestible infographic form. According to the results, 2018 is set to be a big year for Artificial […]

Three of Australia’s largest digital publishers have come together to explore the creation of a local anonymised digital identity cooperative to enable better ad targeting. News Corp Australia, Fairfax Media and Nine have united to create the co-operative, which would bring together and leverage the combined authenticated user ID assets of the three publishers. Following […]

It’s rare we host a playwright on B&T, but today we’re privileged to do just that. Here, Melbourne writer Ron Elisha (pictured below) offers his take on the whole Harvey Weinstein saga and, he predicts, some good may come of it yet… I am a member of that rapidly disintegrating generation raised on reruns of Mutual Of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom […]

Network Ten has announced the appointment of Annabelle Herd to the role of chief operating officer, reporting to Ten CEO, Paul Anderson. Herd was previously Network Ten’s director of corporate and regulatory Affairs. Her new role covers a range of business functions and is effective immediately. Anderson said: “Annabelle has been responsible for leading Ten’s corporate […]

Video cloud service Brightcove has announced that Sydney Festival has selected the platform to improve its user experience through online video content. Brightcove will do so by removing third-party branding and pre-roll ads, as well as adding autoplay functionality, ahead of the event in January. Leveraging the Brightcove video platform to host and publish video […]

Health and wellbeing company Nature’s Way is celebrating the achievements of kids in a series of relatable and entertaining online videos that tug at the heart strings of parents. Instead of using actors to tell the brand story of Nature’s Way’s Kids Smart supplement range, Storyful has helped Wavemaker to license user-generated content clips of […]

Electronics and whitegoods specialist Hisense has announced it has appointed DEC PR to lead its strategic communications remit in the local market, following a competitive tender process. DEC PR will work to support its brand building activities and managing corporate communications. The agency’s work will integrate closely with Hisense’s other marketing partners. Andre Iannuzzi, marketing […]

If you or someone you know is keen to apply for The Marketing Academy’s scholarship program, you better hot foot it, because nominations close this Friday (15 December)! Now in its fourth year, the scholarship is designed to give aspiring marketing leaders the skills and knowledge to get to the top of their industries. Each […]

Outdoor media company QMS Media has strengthened its digital outdoor presence in Victoria, unveiling an iconic digital billboard in the heart of Melbourne’s famous sporting precinct. The launch of ‘The G’ sees QMS’ landmark digital portfolio ‘bookending’ arguably one of the most iconic and in-demand digital outdoor locations in Australia – Richmond Station Bridge – […]

As part of the HSBC World Rugby Sevens Series, the Sydney 7s event returns in January complete with a new brand identity, creative strategy and media campaign. With the 2017 Sydney 7s a sell-out event, the challenge for 2018 was to carry that momentum into the third year, defining Sydney’s place as the new ‘go-to’ […]

Family travel platform Bound Round has announced the launch of its first e-magazine to Australian consumers. Travel Bound is a family-focused, digital quarterly publication available on all Virgin Australia flights through the carrier’s in-flight entertainment system, and is also available for consumer download via the Bound Round website. Bound Round founder and CEO Janeece Keller […]

Amazon Australia has appointed former Samsung Electronics chief marketing officer (CMO) Arno Lenior to lead its marketing division. Lenior worked as Samsung’s CMO for more than three years before departing in 2015. According to his LinkedIn profile, he has also held CEO roles at VR company Virtical and brand consultancy Blue Ocean Brands, and joined […]

The Australian Open has partnered with iconic Australian clothing and lifestyle brand Country Road to supply the uniforms for next year’s tournament. Confirmed today as the official fashion lifestyle Partner of Australian Open 2018, one of Australia’s most loved brands will be worn by thousands of tournament staff at Melbourne Park in January. On-court officials including the chair and […]

After 12 years with Weekend Sunrise, Andrew O’Keefe has decided to step away from his hosting and reporting duties. O’Keefe will continue his full-time role as host of Seven’s quiz show The Chase Australia, as well as focus on other projects with the Network. “The ideal job is doing work you love with people you love,” O’Keefe […]

Fast and effective support will be a competitive differentiator for companies looking to win over digitally transformed customers and employees, new research has revealed. According to a study by IDC and LogMeIn titled Support Services as a Competitive Differentiator, nearly 67 per cent of consumers said that customer satisfaction was more important than price when […]

The Outdoor Media Association (OMA) has announced the appointment of Red Ant Design to build the out-oh-home (OOH) industry’s first automated proposal platform (APP). After an extensive global search and industry consultation, the decision to build the system in-house with a local Australian company was made. The APP will be built in an agile process, […]

LogIn

Signing in with LinkedIn

Please wait while we sign you in with LinkedIn.

This may take some time.

Please be patient and do not refresh the page.

(A new window from LinkedIn should open for you to authorize the B&T login. If you don't see this please check behind this window, and if it is still not there check your browser settings and turn off the pop-up blocker.)